100 Questions, Seventh Category: Payroll, Where One Brand's Website Is Cited in Two Answers Out of Three

Gusto is in every pick

Gusto is named in 76 of 100 answers and recommended in 47. Fourteen of the 20 recommendation-intent queries produced a pick from the dictionary, and Gusto was among the picks in all 14. It was the only pick for a solo business owner, a law firm and an accountant managing multiple client companies. Rippling was picked in 6, ADP and Deel in 4 each, Justworks in 3. No other category in this series has a brand present in every recommendation answer that committed.

The rest of the field is named and passed over

Below Gusto the recommendation rate falls off harder than in any earlier category. ADP is named in 48 answers and chosen in 20. QuickBooks Payroll is named in 36 and chosen in 11. OnPay 32 and 12. Paychex is named in 29 answers and chosen in 5, and three of those five are the queries that explicitly ask about a 50-person or multi-state company. The brands that do get chosen when named are narrow specialists: Deel is named in 19 and chosen in 14, almost always for international or contractor payroll, and Patriot is named in 20 and chosen in 12, almost always as the cheapest full-service option.

The model asks for your headcount before it answers

Ninety of the 100 answers end by asking the buyer for more context, and 77 ask specifically for the number of employees. Twenty-eight answers recommended no dictionary brand at all, twice the next-highest category (payment processing at 14, CRM at 13), spread across every intent. The comparison queries show it most clearly. Eighteen of 30 head-to-heads recommended both sides, the fewest of the seven categories; seven recommended neither. Gusto versus ADP, Gusto versus Paychex, ADP versus Paychex and Deel versus Remote each came back as a feature table followed by a request for headcount, states and benefits. Two of the seven noted that Paychex acquired Paycor in 2025 and treated the comparison as largely moot.

The vertical prompts mostly kept the general field

Law firms and nonprofits got Gusto, OnPay, Justworks and ADP. A real estate brokerage got Gusto and Square Payroll. Restaurants got Toast Payroll and Homebase alongside Gusto and ADP. Healthcare practices got Paylocity. Two prompts did swap the field: household employers were sent to Poppins Payroll, SurePayroll Household and HomePay by Care.com, and construction companies to Payroll4Construction, Foundation Software and Miter, with Gusto and QuickBooks Payroll kept for small private-work contractors only.

More than half the recommendations go to brands that rank

Of the 191 recommended brand mentions, 87 were for brands whose own website does not rank in Google's top ten organic results for that query, 46 percent. That is the lowest figure of the seven categories. Google's top ten for payroll queries is also the most vendor-heavy so far: 347 of the 1,000 organic results are brand sites, and gusto.com, adp.com, intuit.com and onpay.com hold their own category pages.

One website is the reading list

Across 100 answers there were 314 citation events to 91 domains, one per cited domain per answer. gusto.com alone accounts for 65 of them, 21 percent of every citation in the category, and it is cited in 65 of the 100 answers. Forty-eight of those 65 answers are to questions that do not mention Gusto at all: "best payroll software for restaurants", "ADP alternatives", "which payroll software should I use for a 50 person company". Gusto publishes comparison and guide pages on its competitors, and the model reads them. The next most-cited domains are adp.com (20), patriotsoftware.com (15) and intuit.com (13). Sixty-one percent of all citation events went to vendors' own sites, the highest share of any category, and 49 answers cited nothing but vendor pages. Fit Small Business (12) and G2 (10) lead a thin third-party half. Reddit and Wikipedia have zero citations, for the seventh teardown running.

One hundred thirty-four of the 314 citation events involved a domain that also sat in Google's top ten for that query, 43 percent, the highest overlap so far.

Your competitor's content can be your competitor's recommendation engine. In this category the model reads gusto.com to answer questions about ADP, Paychex and restaurant payroll. A vendor that publishes the category's best comparison pages is writing the model's briefing notes. If that vendor is not you, you are being described in someone else's words.

Answer the headcount question on the page. The model asks for employee count in 77 answers because the pages it reads do not say who each product is for by size. The brand that states "for 1 to 50 employees in one state" in plain words gives the model a condition it can use.

Being big is not being chosen. Paychex is one of the largest payroll companies in the country and is chosen in 5 of the 29 answers that name it. Scale gets you into the table; a stated case gets you out of it.

Specialists win their lane outright. Deel for international, Patriot for cheapest, Toast for restaurants, Poppins for household employers. A narrow, clearly stated case is chosen at three to four times the rate of a broad one.

One run per query means answer variance is unmeasured; Benchmark 01 runs each query three times across three surfaces. The teardowns are collected on different days, so differences between categories mix the category with the date. The brand dictionary covers the general payroll software market and deliberately excludes vertical tools, so their appearances are described in prose and not counted. The rule-based coder has one known failure: a brand named as a contrast on the same line as a selecting verb is coded as recommended. Sentiment coding is rule-based and not reported. No vendor-tool cross-check was read for this category. Google's control counts a brand as ranking only when its own domain is in the top ten; a listicle that features the brand does not count. The ChatGPT answers and Google controls for this category were collected four days after the earlier teardowns, through the live connector rather than the standard queue; the settings are the same, the window is not. The dictionary excludes vertical tools by design; Payroll4Construction, Miter, Restaurant365 and HR for Health are described in prose only.

Every number above can be recomputed from these files. CC BY 4.0: use them, cite the page.

• queries.csv: the 100 queries with intent labels.
• brands.csv: the 55-brand dictionary with aliases and canonical domains.
• mentions.csv: 427 coded brand mentions with position, type and whether the brand's domain was in Google's top ten.
• citations.csv: 314 citation events with domain class and Google overlap.
• observations.csv: one row per query with brand, recommendation, citation and control counts.
• codebook.md: the rulebook, with dated amendments through v1.5.

The earlier teardowns: Teardown 01, project management, Teardown 02, crm, Teardown 03, email marketing, Teardown 04, help desk, Teardown 05, accounting, Teardown 06, payment processing. This teardown is also being published on the High Salience Substack.

In payroll the model's picks track one vendor's website. In help desk they track a comparison blog nobody had heard of. In accounting they track NerdWallet. Finding out what the model is reading for your category is the first thing a Category Salience Brief does, with a query set you approve first.